Dr Güneş Tavmen

Güneş joined the Department of Digital Humanities in 2019 as ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow prior to assuming her role as Lecturer in Digital Innovation and Management. She gained her PhD from Birkbeck, University of London with research on (open) data-driven practices, initiatives and discourses in the context of smart city planning in London. In her dissertation, Güneş locates smart cities and data-driven governance within the wider debates of digital culture and traces a historical lineage to the relation between cybernetics and urban planning. Her current research investigates how digital apps modulate urban infrastructure and what the social, material, environmental and cultural implications of these emerging hybrids are.

Previously, Güneş worked at a civil society organisation in Istanbul where she carried out policy research on ICTs, digital innovation, e-government and social media. Following that, she led projects on digital surveillance, censorship and freedom of speech in Turkey, which included preparing country reports for the Association for Progressive Communications. She has also written about the state of data technologies in Turkey for Computer Weekly and on social media and freedom of expression for Open Democracy.

Teaching

Güneş has taught across different subjects including technology and development, urban media and mediated urban, digital cultures, digital economy, critical data studies and theoretical approaches in media studies.

Research interests

Güneş is broadly interested in data and digital app ecosystems and how they generate new infrastructures and epistemologies. Her current research interests are:

• Critical Data Studies
• Political Economy of Data Technologies
• Critical App Studies and Software Studies
• Datafication of Urban infrastructure
• Environmental Justice and Urbanism
• Social Activism and Digital Culture

Selected Publication

Wang, Y. and Tavmen, G. (2024) ‘New outlets of digital feminist activism in China: the #SeeFemaleWorkers campaign’, Feminist Media Studies, pp. 1–17. doi: 10.1080/14680777.2024.2334782.

Tavmen, G. (2023) Cybernetic Urbanism: Tracing the Development of the Responsibilized Subject and Self-Organizing Communities in Smart Cities, in Mackinnon D, Fast V, Burns R (eds), Digital (In)justice in the Smart City, University of Toronto Press.

Tavmen, G. (2020) Data/Infrastructure in the Smart City: Understanding the Infrastructural Power of Citymapper App through Technicity of Data, Big Data & Society.

Tavmen, G. (2019). "Open data means business”: when monetary potential in open data usurps aspirations for accountability and transparency in the smart city. AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2019.

Tavmen, G. & Chakraborti, S. (2017) Interview with Etienne Balibar: on democracy, oppression and universality, London: Birkbeck for the Humanities Blog & Verso Books Blog.

Tavmen, G. (2014) Internet rights that went wrong in Turkey (Special Country Report), Association for Progressive Communications.